Alessandro Strumia

Alessandro Strumia (born 26 December 1969) is a physicist of the University of Pisa. He was suspended from working for CERN in 2018 after giving a talk at CERN where he argued that gender imbalance in physics research is the product of innate attitudes rather than discrimination.

Career

While at CERN, in June 2018, Strumia—with Ricardo Torre—worked on a new set of algorithms with which to evaluate the impact of published scientific research. Basing their investigation on the indices used by Google, they proposed a similar system of ranking scientific output. Their conclusions were, according to commentators, "intriguing", but possibly subject to "transparency issues". Their field of research has been described as significant, owing to the "simplicity" of current methods of evaluation, which cannot cope with the quantity of research being published at the time. The difference in Strunia and Torres' approach is that they include what they describe as "second-generation" citations in their algorithms. Therefore, not only the original citations of the work are taken into account, but subsequent citations to derivative material also. They named their system PaperRank, in acknowledgement of the influence of Google's PageRank on their work.

Incident at CERN

Strumia presented two theories to account for gender disparities in the STEM fields, particularly in physics. He analyzed data from the InSpire database, which covers fundamental physics, ranking papers, authors, journals, institutes, towns, countries, continents, genders, for all-time and in recent time periods. Strumia cited previous research which points to results commonly referred as the "Gender Equality Paradox".

CERN has wiped the slides of Strumia's presentation from its website, stating that "CERN considers the presentation delivered by an invited scientist during a workshop as highly offensive and supports the many members of the community that have expressed their indignation". They also state: "[CERN] is a place where everyone is welcome, and all have the same opportunities, regardless of ethnicity, beliefs, gender or sexual orientation. Strumia has complained that science is "becoming sexist against men". Jessica Wade, scientist at Imperial College, London has rebuked Strumia's claims, saying they have "long been discredited".. However, Tom Whipple has recently contested claims like those made by Wade, saying that recent evidence "is a challenge to one prominent stream of feminist theory, according to which almost all the differences between the sexes come from cultural training and social norms".. Dr. Steve Stewart-Williams, scientist at University of Nottingham, said that "there was now too much evidence of this effect to consider it a fluke".

See also

• Variability Hypothesis
• Resistance to diversity efforts in organizations

External links

• "STRUMIA Alessandro - Pisa Theory Group". Sites.google.com. Retrieved 2 October 2018.